Verbal Abuse: Anti-Trafficking Rhetoric and Violence Against Women

Sherief Gaber offers a fascinating and thorough analysis of anti-trafficking rhetoric and the ideology and actions it drives.

The first focus is on the activities of journalist Nicolar Kristof who famously ‘purchased’ two young Cambodian women  to ‘free’ them from servitude and later turned on them when they failed to live up to his vision of how their lives should be. The article then discusses the rescue and raid missions driven by US policy and enacted by local police and ‘rambo’ style NGOs. Gaber contrasts the orientalist discourse of the sex slave with the rights based approaches to women in the sex industry of organisations like Empower Thailand concluding, "The sex trafficking framework, using and producing notions of the sex worker as a victimized object, cannot address sex work as labor. However, understanding sex work precisely as labor may stand to produce the most gains for the women involved."